this reminds me of the old C-band days. i remember getting "backhauls" with no commercials, announcers, nothing.

the best though was when there WAS announcers but no commercials, they would say they were going to commercial but they never did, the affiliates would put their local commercials in these spots. they used to talk about all kinds of schit because they weren't "on the air".

once, harry neale said during a hockey game of the late bill goldsworthy "he's on the other side of the grass now" and they both started laughing bigtime.

Never having had the "luxury" of OTA reception --- I didn't even realize there were such things as multiple subchannels from a station with varying content...

Until now...

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Some is useless. Many channels have a non-HD digital feed of their HD programming. In Chicago, the local ABC affiliate used to run ABC News Now on a subchannel. Several do the silly weather thing (weather maps/forecasts 24 x 7).

PBS here actually has the national PBS feed on it's "main" HD channel, and a feed of the local programming on a second and PBS Create on the third. One local channel has, like, six subchannels. Again, a lot of chaff, but occasionally one finds some wheat.

I strongly recommend you give OTA reception a try. Depending on where you live, you might just need rabbit ears or a decent indoor antenna.

Sounds cool. No jibber jabber? Wow... Almost makes me want to move to Champaign. Or maybe drink a lot of champagne to forget that I don't have a feed like that.

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That is, without a doubt, the most brilliant programming decision I've ever seen. Frankly, I'd pay a monthly subscription fee to get sports broadcasts sans announcers.

this reminds me of the old C-band days. i remember getting "backhauls" with no commercials, announcers, nothing.

the best though was when there WAS announcers but no commercials, they would say they were going to commercial but they never did

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So they dont still have that today? I had a house with C bad in the early 90s. Was wild watching the war stuff live. I had no idea that tv people swore so much off the air either. I'd catch the feeds from the news vans etc. Boy do they put on their smiley faces though when the red light goes on. I think people's image would be shattered if we ever / still got live feeds such as this.

I'm trying to get my HR10-250 integrated into my Harmony/Logitech H659 controlled system. If I read this thread correctly, at least a couple of years ago, there was no discrete codes to go to specific output formats. Is that still true? The reason I ask is that I want to set up two "activities" for the HD TiVo... one that shows HD. The other that switches everything to 480i. The reason I want to do that is because I have it wired to an RF modulator to send the signal via coax to other parts of the house. I don't want to toggle between 720p and 480i. I just want it to be able to set the output correctly based on the activity. Same is true for the "aspect" setting. Can it be set, not toggled?

No discrete commands for formats, no native format mode, and no S-video or composite output at low-res concurrent with high-def on the component and HDMI outputs. All these omissions add up to the fact that it is impossible to control the HR10-250 intelligently with a control system such as yours (or such as mine, which is AMX).

No discrete commands for the aspect ("ratio") settings, either. (However, there is a "dodge" that works pretty well, since most high-def sets have decent aspect controls of their own. Tell the HR10-250 that the aspect ratio of your TV set is 4:3, even if the actual sets are a mixture of both 4:3 and 16:9. The HR10-250's aspect control works exactly the same on the high-res formats, output via component and HDMI, regardless of the "setup setting" of "TV aspect ratio". But setting the TV aspect ratio to 4:3 makes the "ratio" toggle work better when the format is changed to low-res and the S-video and/or composite outputs are being used, as for your RF modulator.)

The lack of decent format control has gotten me to seriously consider opening the box and tapping the drive voltages on the front panel's format LEDs. Then, using those voltages as input to a set of status ports on an AMX controller, one could programmatically determine what actual format mode the box is in when you send the "format toggle" command ...

But most likely I will just wait for the HR20-250. Although it is not a TiVo box, it is known that the HR20-250 will support direct control via an RS232 port (using the same command set that has historically been supported by DirecTV receivers, which includes discrete format codes). It is also likely that the HR20-250 will support concurrent low-res/high-res output, and a native format mode (since the current crop of non-DVR high-def DirecTV receivers, such as the LG LSS-3200A, do support those features).

The people who have seen the demo / beta units seem to say that the second sentence here is untrue, you can change output format by remote. Can anyone confirm this? It would be highly annoying if you couldn't.

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The remote that came with my DirecTV HD DVR has both a button that controls ratio and also you can program the up arrow to change formats. The programming is done using the menu for settings and then select "remote control".

I have been using Tivo for about a year and a half now... but have been to busy with "life" to really get into them any deeper than figuring out how to do the 30 second skip, & turn on the TV and audio receiver with the single green button on the Tivo remote..., which interestingly enough seemed to work fine on my 80gig SD-Tivo's, but does not seem to work on the remotes for my HD-Tivo (is there something different here)?

To whit... I had an SD-Tivo set up
with my wife's JVC television and Denon audio receiver running the
sound output. When I programmed the remote I went through the menu to
setup the TV and the Receiver and from then on when I pushed the green
button (with the switch in the satellite position) both the TV and the
Denon would power up (great)! However, I just upgraded my wife's Tivo
to the HR 10-250 in preparation for upgrading her TV to HD this
summer. However, when I was programming the new remote the green
button operates the TV only for power, not the receiver. The remote
does operate the receiver for sound control just fine... but will not
do the one-button power-up that I enjoyed with the old remote. So I
am just using the old remote which still operates the TV and the
receiver just fine and seems to have no issues interfacing with the
HD-Tivo... (although I would really prefer using the HD remote). Is
there something different about the HD remote that prevents them from
operating in the same fashion that my older remote from the SD-Tivo
does?

The remote that came with my DirecTV HD DVR has both a button that controls ratio and also you can program the up arrow to change formats. The programming is done using the menu for settings and then select "remote control".

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Quite true. But the issue here, for home automation folks like myself, is not whether the remote can be used to change format and aspect ration, but whether or not these things can be controlled discretely. Unfortunately, both the "Ratio" button and the "Up Arrow" act as "toggles" that flip from one mode to another  they do not provide a direct method to put the DVR in any specific format or aspect ratio.

For home automation purposes, "toggling" keys on remotes are next to useless. The classic example is the "Power On/Off" button. (Fortunately, some brands of equipment do provide separate IR codes for "Power On" and "Power Off", even though they are not always implemented as two separate buttons on the actual remote that comes with the device.)